Is HD Pointilless?

In France in about 1880 Seurat developed the painting technique called "Divisionism" or what later became known as "Pointillism". Specifically what he discovered, was that the careful and almost mathematical placement of coloured dots of only primary colours, when viewed from a distance, would become a full colour image (best known example would be "Sunday afternoon on the island of La Gande Jatte")

This is the same principle, which is employed today in the process of 4-colour printing, and why television works. If you view a 'billboard' up close you will see quite large dots of Cyan Magenta Yellow and Black, and not image. But from a distance, it is a stunning, full colour, sharp image. TV is exactly the same, even though it is pretty low resolution.

What Seurat actually realised, is the brain is a capable device of interpreting data to create a 'full image' from relatively little.

Modern marketers will have us believe the HD is the future. That such higher resolutions will amaze us. But it is a recognised fact, that from a normal home viewing distance of lets say at least 4 meters, you will not be able to tell the difference between high definition and normal definition, certainly between 480p and 720p; or even 1080i I would argue.

Of course, viewed up close, or with a critical eye in a shop, the difference would be clear. However, my Apple cinema display is 1680x1050, because I am a designer, and I sit 40cm away from it, and I am grateful for it's beautiful sharpness.

At the same time they try to sell us the chance to watch a TV with '3.6billion colours', impressive considering the human eye can only distinguish between 30000 colours.

Another point to keep in mind, is that this 'ultra sharpness' means there is less 'smoothing, going on between the lines as it were. On a CRT tv the image is in someway 'blended' as Seurat would imagine, giving an overall smoother and therefore more complete image.

Let me describe it like this also. HD gaming output is just smoke and mirrors. Something which struck me watching Starwars III, revenge of the sith. The space fight sequences (although only 480p on my normal DVD) are rich, deep complex, smooth and detailed, in a way far beyond any 1080i Xbox 360 game. My proposal is that engineers should look at what makes this possible, than just upping the resolution. The true success of the 'Next Generation' Relies on re-understanding how our brain receives information, and not just trying to fool us with more resolution. Higher resolutions do not make aliasing go away, it just makes it smaller.

My proposal from a total layman point of view is that 480p is more than enough, and what a console needs to be able to do is process the output as an image, almost like 'rendering the scene, taking a photograph of it, and then aliasing this, then displaying it in the screen', surely this would create an image similar to watching a dvd, than watching a computer image.

What I believe game developers need to be doing in next generation however, is utilising the power to create new 'styles' and not 'photorealsim'. Using their imaginations to create things we have never seen before.